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Abstract
This thesis provides an analysis of the relationship between human rights and international HIV policy. It critiques the roles and influences of human rights in international policy responses to HIV/AIDS. It asks how international HIV policy has functioned as a technology of power, employing human rights and public health as paramount rhetoric, in a discourse designed to achieve specific policy aims of universal prevention and universal treatment of HIV. The central concern of this thesis is to determine how the subject of international HIV policy has been positioned and subjectified by the prominence of human rights in international HIV policy development.
The thesis examines the work of certain contemporary human rights theorists and applies the work of Foucault and Derrida to its analysis of policy as a dominant discursive structure. It analyses the historical development of international HIV policy and the positioning of public health and human rights as being complementary and co-related to achieving the aims of that policy, over the last thirty years. It examines key policy documents, dating from the mid-1980s, and traces the introduction of human rights as a policy strategy. It looks at the implications of how this policy has preferenced the state as the primary instrument of both public health and human rights interventions in responses to HIV/AIDS. The thesis shows that the authority of public health and the authority of human rights derive from different conceptions of individual identity, citizenship and the state. It illustrates the tensions that have resulted between the universal claim of human rights and the individual subject of international HIV policy.
The thesis shows that the subject of human rights and international HIV policy has been cast as other and as vulnerable. It demonstrates how human rights have both individualised and universalised the subject of international HIV policy and the implications of this for that subject. Ultimately the thesis argues that it is through the framing of human rights as an integral component of international HIV policy that the subject of this policy has been responsibilised and made deserving of those rights and the protections of public health.